One of my favorite sessions this year at Oracle OpenWorld was the Oracle University Mini Lesson – PeopleSoft Enterprise and Web Services, session S783.

They went through the history and capabilities of web services, but I was primarily interested in the capabilities of PeopleTools 8.4x. My biggest take-away was the WSDL capabilities of Component Interface.

SOAPTOCI is a standards-compliant SOAP wrapper for Component Interface.

The promise of Component Interface has always been that you can programmatically enter data into PeopleSoft and it would execute all of the validations and business logic in real-time, including workflow transactions. The biggest disadvantage has been that even minor PeopleTools upgrades force you to upgrade your API libraries. SOAPTOCI addresses this concern, and makes Component Interface accessible to web service orchestration tools like the BPEL Process Manager.

In PeopleTools 8.4x, SOAPTOCI is actually pretty well documented in PeopleBooks. Check out your PeopleSoft Component Interfaces PeopleBook under the “Using WSDL Binding for Component Interface”.

I won’t go into the setup of SOAPTOCI, so check out the instructions in PeopleBooks. It will take you through setting up the SOAPTOCI synchronous transaction on the node of your choice.

Once you do get the SOAPTOCI message set up, you’re ready to start executing Component Interfaces. Let's get started.

First, fire up SendMaster (under $PS_HOME/sendmaster). If you've never used it, SendMaster is a developer tool that lets you post and get from a web server. You can enter the URL, HTTP headers, and XML message, and it has a window to show you the web server response.

The Server URL should be constructed like this: http://<servername.domain>:<port>/PSIGW/HttpListeningConnector.

HTTP headers should be:
MessageName:SOAPTOCI
MessageType:Sync
From:SOURCENODE
Content-Type:text/xml
SOAPAction:#SOAPTOCI#SOURCENODE
You’ll need to change SOURCENODE to be the node that you configured the SOAPTOCI transaction on.

Now I selected the Location Component Interface for this example. If you’re not running PeopleSoft Financials, feel free to choose any Component Interface that you like. You might want to open the LOCATION component interface in Application Designer as you work thorough this example so that you can see how the different XML tags map to the different Component Interface properties and methods.

Set the Input file like this:
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
<SOAP-ENV:Header>
<Security_Request>
<Username>LC005360</Username>
<Password>secretpassword</Password>
</Security_Request>
</SOAP-ENV:Header>
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<Find__CompIntfc__LOCATION>
<SETID>SHARE</SETID>
<LOCATION>2</LOCATION>
</Find__CompIntfc__LOCATION>
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

Notice the <Security_Request> tag. This is where you enter the PeopleSoft Application Username and Password. Keep in mind that this user will need to have security to the component interface. This is set up on the Permission list under the Component Interface tab.

Now let’s discuss the <Find__CompIntfc__LOCATION> tag. This directs SOAPTOCI to load the LOCATION component interface, and execute the Find method on the data contained within this node. That data in this example is <SETID> and <LOCATION>.

So what does this do, exactly? Well, it would be like the user navigating to the LOCATION component, entering SHARE for the SETID and the number 2 for location, and clicking search. The user would be presented with all locations that begin with the number 2 for a location.

Executing this in SendMaster generates the following XML in the Output Information window:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoaporg/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoaporg/soap/envelope/"
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
<SOAP-ENV:Header/>
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<Find__CompIntfc__LOCATIONResponse xmlns="http://psfttemp.org">
<LOCATION><SETID>SHARE</SETID><LOCATION>2000</LOCATION></LOCATION>
<LOCATION><SETID>SHARE</SETID><LOCATION>2001</LOCATION></LOCATION>
<LOCATION><SETID>SHARE</SETID><LOCATION>2002</LOCATION></LOCATION>
<LOCATION><SETID>SHARE</SETID><LOCATION>2003</LOCATION></LOCATION>
<LOCATION><SETID>SHARE</SETID><LOCATION>2004</LOCATION></LOCATION>
</Find__CompIntfc__LOCATIONResponse></SOAP-ENV:Body></SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

So, you get what you’d expect if you did the equivalent transaction on-line, except you get it in an XML format.

One more example – let’s actually create a new location through SOAPTOCI. Switch the Find__CompIntfc__LOCATION> tag to <Create__CompIntfc__LOCATION>, change the <LOCATION> value to a new location, and add a < DESCR> tag with a valid location description. You’ll notice that in Application Designer, DESCR is actually a child of LOCATION_TBL, so you’ll need to have a parent LOCATION_TBL before DESCR. Your file should resemble the following:

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
<SOAP-ENV:Header>
<Security_Request>
<Username>LC005360</Username>
<Password>secretpassword</Password>
</Security_Request>
</SOAP-ENV:Header>
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<Create__CompIntfc__LOCATION>
<SETID>SHARE</SETID>
<LOCATION>ABC</LOCATION>
<LOCATION_TBL>
< DESCR>ABCDEFG</DESCR>
</LOCATION_TBL>
</Create__CompIntfc__LOCATION>
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

After posting, the Output Information should resemble the following:
<?xml version="1.0"?>

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoaporg/soap/encoding/" xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoaporg/soap/envelope/" SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><SOAP-ENV:Header/>

<SOAP-ENV:Body><Create__CompIntfc__LOCATIONResponse xmlns="http://psfttemp.org"><notification>1</notification>

<Detail/></Create__CompIntfc__LOCATIONResponse></SOAP-ENV:Body></SOAP-ENV:Envelope>



Notice the notification tag shows a 1. In the PeopleSoft world, 1 is a successful return code.

Now check, the database. You’ll find your new location there.
SQL> select
2 SETID,LOCATION,EFFDT,DESCR
3 FROM PS_LOCATION_TBL
4 where location = 'ABC';

SETID LOCATION EFFDT DESCR
----- ---------- --------- ------------------------------
SHARE ABC 30-SEP-05 ABCDEFG

Well, I hope that gets you started. You can also update information and get information through SOAPTOCI from just about any component interface. Best of luck!

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Last Updated on Monday, 22 January 2007 07:15.